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Nonopherian Fisk
Nonopherian Fisk, who prefers to go by his last name only, is the squire and partner to Michael Sevenson's knight errant. He is notable for his criminal past, and he continued to use the skills he developed in his old ways are often used to aid him in assisting Michael in their quests. He was born and initially raised in Fallon, but his father, a schoolteacher with aspirations of becoming a professor, moved them to the nearby Ruesport when he heard Ruesport might build a university, which never came to be. Because of his father, Fisk had a very educated upbringing, and grew to have love for reading and a grudging interest in most things scholarly. Grudging, because after watching his father's increasingly desperate struggles to be accepted to a university, and the selfish act he made of giving away the family's only real valuable asset after his death, leaving his family with next to nothing, Fisk was left with a very poor opinion of his father and his passion for scholarly pursuits. It was when Fisk's mother was dying of a wide-spread influenza outbreak that he committed his first criminal act, breaking into a herbalist's shop to steal magica medicine for her. Unfortunately, all it earned him was a black-eye from another thief, because due to the high demand for it, there was no medicine that would help his mother in the shop. Fisk's mother died two days later. Fisk and his sisters scraped together all the money they could by selling furniture, taking any job they could get. After a year, Fisk's eldest sister Anna was fired from the tavern she worked at after almost being assaulted by a customer. This was when Fisk decided to seek out the other burglar he had met in the herbalist's shop, and talked the man into taking him on as an apprentice. After another two years, the Fisk siblings were still only scraping by, when an older man named Horatio Maxwell approached Anna at the new tavern she was working at to ask for her hand in marriage. Anna made a deal with him that saved almost all of her siblings; Fisk, being a known criminal in the city, was the only one Maxwell refused to take in, for fear of his own reputation. His sisters might have argued for him, but Fisk left before they could make a fuss. Knowing his love for his sisters, it's not unlikely that he made the decision to do so having their well-being higher on his list of priorities than his own. It wasn't very long after he left Ruesport that Fisk met a man whose name was not Jack Bannister, who rescued Fisk from being caught by the workers of the spice shop he'd just burgled. Jack had then intended to burgle the then emptied spice shop himself, but Fisk convinced him that he could be of help in the task, and it was the beginning of their partnership. In their time together, Jack taught Fisk as many finer points of scamming people that he could, and his lessons were usually harsh. Fisk had at one point had an unconscious tell while playing cards, to click the edge of good cards in his hand with his fingernail. He lost this tell after a while of being whelped by Jack on the back of his hand whenever he was caught doing it. The last of Jack's hard lessons had come with the end of their partnership, when Jack had abandoned Fisk to take the fall for a con they were pulling that was taking a nosedive. Fisk barely escaped in time. Then, after some time working cons on his own, his deeds in the town of Deepbend caught up to him and he was arrested. Not being able to pay the sum to redeem himself, Fisk would have likely faced a flogging, if a young man in the crowd watching hadn't stepped up to pay it for him. Characteristics Fisk is neither plain nor handsome and looks very respectable. Much more often than a criminal, strangers take him to be a clerk or a scholar. He's said to have "an honest face." His hair is naturally curly and brown, but he has been known to dye it different colors for disguises. He is shorter than Michael, close to a middling height, and of a stocky build. When his guard is down, Fisk can be very candid in his expressions. One of Fisk's favorite pastimes is telling jokes about the differences between bandits and folks of all other professions. Fisk's successful years of con artistry has left him with incredible acting skills, not limited to lying and charming most people into giving him the results he wants. He was once also skilled in pickpocketing and card sharping, but has fallen out of practice after his years traveling with Michael. Fisk has more knowledge of forgery than he does skill, but is quite skilled at sewing and embroidering. He calls Michael "Noble Sir" when he wants to annoy him. "Mike" was also used to annoy Michael, until Fisk's first name was revealed and they silently reached an agreement that their respective embarrassing family nicknames were out of bounds. Relationships Fisk's best friend is his ex-employer, current mystery solving partner, and possibly future brother-in-law, Michael Sevenson. Arguments are not uncommon between them, but after all they have been through together, it would be impossible for them not to have truly bonded. His relationship with his father, who died when Fisk was about nine, seems to have been a mix of good and bad. Little has been said of Fisk's mother at all, much less his feelings for her, but it's assumed that she left a positive impression on him after she died about a year after her late husband. Fisk has three sisters, two older, one younger, all of whom he get's along with, despite their inability to shake the habit of calling him "Nonny," his childhood nickname. The eldest is Anna, older than Fisk by four years. Judith is second oldest, older than him by three years and was the only one of Fisk's sisters to be taught like him by their father, which served to fan the fire of an affectionate but still occasionally heated sibling rivalry between the two of them. Lissy is the youngest, having been born about three years after Fisk. When visiting them in Rogue's Home for the first time in five years, Fisk seems to easily fall back into his relationships with his older sisters. But because of his absence in her life, and how much she's grown up since last seeing her, Fisk appears to be the most at odds with Lissy--not because of any real disagreement between them, but he appears to be slightly torn between wanting to be the older brother to her that he thought he should have been, and trying to reign himself in from this impulse, knowing that the time for it has already passed. Still, it's hard for him to not let some of his overprotective feelings show in the presence of Lissy's suitor, Tristram Fowler. Fisk has an understandably strained relationship with his brother-in-law, Horatio Maxwell, with his marriage terms to Anna being the reason Fisk is cut off from seeing his sisters. Fisk is very fond of his niece and nephew, Becca and Thomas Maxwell. During Scholar's Plot, he realizes that he has developed romantic feelings for Kathryn Sevenson, and they end that book in a relationship together.